Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Yeah, this grinds...

A modest suggestion: from now on, every president who wishes to go abroad and review all his lesser citizens' collective past and present sins, with accompanying apologies — to applause from foreigners — must first, in the spirit of New Testament atonement, review his own regrettable transgressions.

...although I have no idea why he thinks America is uniquely "guilty", besides his sheer ignorance (Heather hat Schadenfreude weil sie kann mehr Österreichish sprechen dann Barry*). I guess they don't teach European history in America anymore, but you'd think in the time he was growing up in Indonesia, someone might have mentioned the Dutch.

It's the 21st Century...no one alive in the U.S. today has been a slave, with the following exceptions that "progressives" do not care about: women and children smuggled over the border to work in the sex trade, illegal immigrants trapped in sweatshops to "pay off" their smugglers, and children forced to perform "mandatory volunteerism" to obtain the junior high or high school diploma formerly seen as their free right. So let's get on with it already.

* I make no claims to proper grammar/word order. My respect for people who learn English as an adult--especially if their native language wasn't in the same Indo-European family--has soared since I started trying to learn Deutsch. It physically hurts trying to figure out where to put prepositions when you've done it a different way your whole life...